A Farewell to Vienna

Abstract

This chapter contains some reflections by Luzi Korngold, wife to Erich Korngold. In her first published statement on her life with Erich, Luzi recounted the start of their relationship, concisely and directly and in the third person. “In the spring of 1917, Erich got to know his future wife, Luzi Sonnenthal, granddaughter of the court actor Adolf Ritter v. Sonnenthal. From the very first meeting, there developed between these two young people a friendship and sense of connectedness that was unbreakable and would endure throughout their lives.” More than anything else, Luzi's memoir of the journeys she shared with Erich in 1935–1938 testifies to her experience of that sense of friendship and connectedness, of the experience of a family whose destiny was altered by forces they could not control, but through which they endured.